Icons of the Argentine Pantheon: Their common thread is Juan Peron, whom Che Guevara, from Cuba, sought hard to bring home from exile. They had become friends but Peron disapproved of guerrilla warfare and warned Che not to start it in Bolivia
because it would be 'suicide'. He was right.
Fr. Blake, thanks to his Argentine waiter-friend, has nailed a great insight into one aspect of Peronism - its caudillismo, the cult of the leader-who-is-always-right - and how this has bled over into Jorge Bergoglio.
Peronism and corruption
January 25, 2018
I had a lesson in Peronism from an Argentinian waiter recently, in Argentina he was a PPE graduate.
[PPE - for philosophy, politics and economics - is probably the most 'popular' undergraduate major in British universities and those that style themselves after the British universities.]
Peronism, he said, was the most corrupt form of politics, because you could be a Communist, or a Facist, or a Capitalist, the only thing that mattered was support for Peron, and post-Peron, any other head of State. It is a remnant of 1920s-30s Fascism, where
the will of the Fuhrer or Il Duce was all that mattered. Right or Wrong, Good or Bad, Custom or Tradition, Law or Morality, or anything else pale into insignificance and have no validity compared to the Will of the Leader.
Therefore the ideal is to be as close as possible to the Leader, failing direct proximity the next best thing is to be close either to those who are close to the Leader or those know, or claim to know, the mind of the Leader.
Under such a system,
moral automony is reduced to slavery because is no mral compass, such abstracts as Right and Wrong are of no importance. All that does matter is Dux Vult (The leader wills it). If the leader is somewhat erratic that doesn't really matter, it just means his followers have to be closer and listen even more intently, and it could be that what was the Leader's will last year or even this morning, might not be so now, or his will expressed to A might be the complete opposite of what was expressed to B.
To the Peronist, the old elite, who based their authority on intellectual expertise or their understanding, or knowledge of - even their fidelity to - the law must be supplanted, as nothing other than the leader's will matters. They represent an alternative authority, and therefore a possible alternative source of power, and certainly a source of evaluation and criticism. Peronism hates intellectuals - they are always totally arbitrary and concerned with what is expedient, what adds to or deepens the leader's power.
Nowadays everyone identifies the rule of Francis as in some sense Peronist. It is a popular conclusion, and I identified it at the beginning of his reign, somewhat positively, as appealing to the ordinary man in that he tried to make the Papacy 'popular'. That was a bit naive of me - it is actually Peronism, which is essentially about making the leader powerful.
The trouble with Peronism, as my waiter friend explaine,d is that far from being a cure for corruption it becomes a source of it The corruption in the Vatican is based on nepotism and patronage. It is the old Italian thing, as dominant in Rome as it is in Palermo:
X has done me a favour, therefore I will do a favour for Y, who will do you a favour, in return for you helping Z, who will then be indebted to me.
Peronism thrives on this because relations with the leader, rather than integrity, honour or honesty, are all that matters. It does indeed reduce everyone to slavery because personal integrity is always subject to whatever the leader wants. North Korea is perhaps the Peronist ideal, or at least its reductio ad absurdum.
Peronism
[which in this case, has mutated into Bergoglism] cannot tolerate upright men of integrity. But it does approve and welcome the servile and weak and those who are either stupid, indebted in some sense or lack integrity, who are therefore always corruptible. One could list a huge number of Bergoglio courtiers who fit into this category.
In his recent comment in Chile on Bishop Barros, while denouncing Barros's sccusers of being calumnious liars, the Pope quite rightly says "bring me evidence and I will act". It is right and just to have proof, and innocence should be presumed. The problem, of course, is that in other situations he has removed bishops on mere rumour or gossip, as in the case of the
[orthodox and traditional and vocation-building] Bishop of Ciudad del Este, Paraguay.
[Thank you, Father, for bringing that up. It is certainly a most apposite case to cite. I had forgotten all about it in my outrage with Bergoglio's obsession with Barros.]
In the English-speaking world the norm is:
if a priest or bishop is accused of sexual abuse, he is suspended until he is exonerated, and the burden of prove is on him, not his accuser. In Italy, Francis has a reputation of extending 'mercy' to the friends of friends of sexual abusers such as Fr Mauro Inzoli, suspended by Benedict, then rehabilitated by Francis, then suspended again when he was convicted and imprisoned. His own record on sexual abusers in Buenos Aires is reportedly not quite a shining example - it compares very poorly to Cardinal Pell's, even in the 1980s.
It is a very Peronist way of acting, where due process or good practice is over-ridden according to the leader's will or friendships.
The same could be said of the 'wedding on the plane' - due process, ritual, law, all seemingly ignored for the sake of what many might see as a stunt.
The Papal award to Liliane Ploumen or his repeated praise of Emma Bonino can be seen in Peronist terms: what matters is not Catholic belief but what is political expedient. It is a good thing in the eyes of the world, or just his friends to praise or honour famous women who might be pro-abortion but, more important to Bergoglio, they are anti-trafficking, anti-violence against women
[and pro-indiscriminate immigration].
The latest action of asking Chinese 'underground' Catholic Bishops to step down in favour of State appointees is indeed a Peronist act. The orthodoxy, the past suffering and loyalty of such bishops and their people, counts for little compared with rapprochement with the Chinese Government.
[But not for the sake of rapprochement per se, but to pave the way for Bergoglio to become the first pope to visit China. In which he appears to be willing to sacrifice the millions of Chinese Catholics who have chosen to be in the 'underground' Church.]
The message sent to the world is that in its relationship with the world, everything the Catholic Church once believed is up for grabs - and with China, almost as if what is most desired is a Papal visit to China and the 'image' it might bring the Holy See and the Pope personally.